CCH Pounder will be front and center in episode 315, "End of the Line."
(CBS)

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CCH Pounder can’t shake the sky. There’s something about it that catches her eye and refuses to let go — at least not until she catches it in kind, with nothing more than the point and click of a camera.

“I think they’re spectacular creatures,” Pounder tells Parade about her fascination with clouds, and why she documents them through photography. “There’s this whole other life force in clouds. That whole feeling of entering the atmosphere, being above the clouds and descending into them… it’s fascinating to me. It never disappoints. No matter what they give, they give you something amazing to look at.”

Pounder sees far beyond the clouds, photographing the world around her as she lives and breathes it. Our conversation takes place on the NCIS: New Orleans set, in a dimly lit hallway covered in framed photographs taken by members of the cast and crew. Pounder is among the most prolific of these artists, with several of her photos hanging on the walls, ones that are more focused on the Big Easy’s city streets than the skies above.

“It’s a fascinating city just to look at,” she says about New Orleans. “There’s everything here: the good, the bad and the super ugly. It’s all here. There’s a parade every other day. It has so much to offer.”

“The weather changes here constantly,” she continues. “We shoot in the rain and the mist and the drizzle and the sweltering heat. It’s an unusual place in terms of atmosphere. Everywhere you look, there’s something that’s very germane to this area. You have noises like maybe a fire engine going by on the east coast. Here, it’s cicadas. What critter is making that noise?”

Pounder walks through life with open eyes and an open memory, storing her experiences even when there isn’t a camera to chronicle the moment. It’s how she approaches acting, too, keeping characters along for the journey from project to project. Take, for example, Claudette Wyms of The Shield, one of Pounder’s most celebrated roles across decades as an actor. Claudette wasn’t in the popular consciousness until The Shield debuted in 2002, but Pounder says she’s existed as far back as two 1993 detective roles: one in a television movie called TheDisappearance of Christina, the other in the Sharon Stone thriller Sliver.

“When Claudette came along for The Shield, I went, ‘Oh, maybe I can actually explore this character,'” she says, describing the process of characters living within her across multiple projects. “Some of these characters, when you go in and you only have two scenes, you go, ‘Oh there’s something interesting about her. How can I make her grow?’ You can’t really do that on film, but you can on series television, when you have all of these opportunities as the story moves forward to bring out a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Claudette was very hardboiled in the beginning, for example, and over time, there was something else going on.”

Pounder says there’s a similar arc for Loretta Wade, the chief medical examiner she plays on NCIS: New Orleans as a series regular. She feels the character has changed in some subtle but crucial ways over the course of the show’s three seasons, a transformation that started within its earliest episodes.

“With each thing you do, you will find something to create. If it’s not necessarily on the page, you can have conversations with writers and directors,” she says. “For instance, one of the things I noticed at the very beginning is that Wade was kind of an authority figure. I always worry when they say she’s the ‘moral center’ of the show. I came in with this idea: if a person has been in New Orleans for a while, she’s a single person as far as we know, and we’re looking at all of these parades and feathers and fluff, and people are partying and dancing everywhere, surely some of this has caught on. When you’re working with dead bodies for most of your days, surely there’s some kind of lively aspect to her. I really wanted to inject that into her. She has a life force into her. She looks for admirals to go party with. A drink or two ain’t the worst thing in the world. She shows up at Pride’s (Scott Bakula) bar all the time. I think she’s a woman of life, and since she’s so aware of what dead is, she’s always seeking life.”

Wade’s search for life becomes the show’s focus as soon as the Feb. 21 episode of NCIS: New Orleans, called “End of the Line,” which promises to shed new light on the medical examiner’s back story. For her part, Pounder has already discovered new shades to Wade during season three, as she’s wrestled with her associate Sebastian Lund (Rob Kerkovich) becoming a full-fledged member of the NCIS team.

“With Sebastian, who Wade is losing at this point, she’s starting to have presumptions and assumptions, as opposed to waiting to see how things unfold,” says Pounder. “She gets caught in a trap that she would have told somebody else about. It’s really good for her to be flawed again and have to see the world with new eyes, open up and expand her horizons. It’s evolved.”

Pounder’s perspective on characters aligns with her perspective on the sky, then. In one moment, she’s the law-upholding police officer nursing ancient wounds. In the next, she’s a coroner surrounded by death all day, and filled with life at night. Likewise, Pounder looks out at the world and sees a whole mess of beauty, even on the cloudiest days.

“A lot of people look outside and say, ‘Oh, it’s gray today.’ But I see formations,” she says. “Particularly in the south, where there are these big, fat, fluffy white clouds… the kind where you see your sheets blowing in the wind. But I even love when it’s all bright. How can it be so incredibly blue? It’s like a swath of blue with nothing in it.”

Pounder puts it another way: whether it’s rain or shine, clear or grey, “any kind of day is my kind of day.”

Launch the gallery below to see some of Pounder’s photography, and tune into the Feb. 21 episode of NCIS: New Orleans at 10 p.m. ET on CBS for a closer look at Loretta Wade.